Here’s a good topic for just after Halloween: are you easily spooked or do you prefer to keep in the land of the logical? Though I am a pretty logical person overall and don’t like to get taken too far off the beaten path, because there would be just no end to it, it can be pretty hard to avoid when you are very highly sensitive. I certainly have a track record of picking up on strong negative energies in a space, in fact its something that happens to me a lot, whether I like it or not. I just tend to know, almost instantly, using my heightened intuition, when it wouldn’t be a good idea to hang around a place and I have quite a few stories I could tell.

As a child, I would often wake up with night frights from seeing or sensing things that other people couldn’t see and would drive my parents nuts with the need to get into their bed or have the light left on. All children do that to a point, you might say, but not all of them do it to the degree that I can recall, including some very strong reactions to certain places we went to on family visits that spooked me for years afterwards. When kids do this, they are often picking up on energies that are far more real than a lot of adults, who have conditioned themselves not to believe in such “nonsense”, would like to think!

Dogs do this too. My last dog was incredibly sensitive and our heightened sensibilities would often coincide, getting hyper-aroused at exactly the same time, which was interesting. The validation of my dog suddenly not wanting to settle down in his favourite bed or floor pacing all night, as happened every night for a week that we spent staying in a converted mill on the Pembrookshire coastline, at the exact same time as I was lying there both seeing and feeling the energy of a sort of hoard of spirits gathering in our bedroom every night, only made the place feel even more haunted!

So the old cottage where we are currently staying (as I keep mentioning) has had a troublesome energy that we both perceived from the very moment we moved in but then it has also been very hard to single out that disquieting feeling from the strong resistance we’re also feeling about the very fact we are still here instead of living in the house we thought we would have managed to purchase by now. It’s all too easy to defer to the more “logical” reasons for experiencing feelings of discomfort or resistance and we have been trying to do that for some time. Yes, we feel heavy whenever we come back here but how much of that was to do with the house itself and how much was it just our sadness and impatience at still living in the wrong place after all these months? Yet it really wasn’t so bad here when the Indian summer allowed us to spend more time outdoors…but since we’ve been forced to stay inside pretty much all day as the seasons change, its been a whole other issue and the heavy, energy-sapping feeling has really started to get to us. Meanwhile, the nights have been the hardest, especially as we were forced out of the main bedroom, not only by damp coming through the walls as the autumn weather got started but by a heavy feeling that both of us were picking up on until we literally couldn’t wait to move out of it into the spare room which, comparatively, doesn’t feel quite so bad…

So we’ve continued on and we’ve probably protested too much about some of the minor inconveniences of this house but there was really something much more affecting, a much stronger gut feeling bothering both of us and we’ve been talking about it much more lately. Yet it was only when a friend of mine blurted out how worried she had been when I told her where we are staying (which I would have expected to have elicited an “ooh that’s nice, lucky you” as it is a beautiful spot) because she and her husband cycled here once to explore the area and found the energy of the place so heavy, spooky and abhorrent that they literally cycled on through as they couldn’t wait to leave again. A bit of digging, after our conversation, finally threw up that the village itself, which as I have mentioned before feels odd, like a deserted stage-set with no feeling of domesticity or warmth, in spite of its tight little clutch of honey-coloured cottages, was once the hang-out of a large gathering of criminals, murderers and looters, as a result of which a band of equally blood-thirsty vigilantes had been formed to “police” them, basing themselves in the underground tunnels of quarries close to our house.

It was after speaking to my friend, who was adamant that this village is “dark” or “possessed” that I decided to call in Emma Loveheart of Into the Light. I had called Emma in a couple of times before, quite a few years ago, when we were having problems with both our old house and my husband’s place of work. She was recommended to me by a functional therapist I was seeing at the time, a guy who (until he told me about her) had struck me as one of the most left-brained people I had so far dealt with; this was not one of my usual holistic healers with their multifaceted approach to solving my health conundrums! No, he was the sort who had a pile of reference books and peer-reviewed studies at his elbow and who wanted me to try out a protocol of multiple blood and DNA tests to “logically” get to the bottom of my autoimmune conditions. So when he mentioned that Emma might be useful to me, I was astonished but apparently his wife had called her in when they were having problems with their teenage daughter and, as I recall, some clearing work on the old house where they lived had solved the issue so effectively, without the daughter even being told, not to mention improving the feeling of the house that he had been utterly blown away and now passed on her details to anyone who sounded like they might benefit.

We were impressed too, after we called her in to assess our house, for similar reasons as above but also because our dog had become suddenly extremely unsettled in the evenings and had taken up sometimes circling a small area of the floor or, at other times, suddenly leaping from his bed and walking across to the far corner of the room where he would stare fixedly at the wall, nervously twitching his tail, all of which had us wondering about his mental health. On top of my own environmental sensitivities, which were on the rise at that time, it seemed like a good idea to call Emma in. As well as finding quite a bit of geopathic and other stress to work on (not all negative or disturbing “energies” are to do with ghosts!), Emma located a defunct spring or well creating disturbance beneath our house and I was later able to corroborate that by making some enquiries of the local history group. The clearing work she did had such a positive effect that the teenage dramas died down instantly (apparently negative energies are often attracted to the children of a household), the dog went back to his old routines and seemed even more settled in his bed than before and I felt as though a weight had literally been lifted off the house, as did my husband. 

So much so that when we began to notice the increasing amount of resistance he was experiencing to spending time in the old building that was his office at the time, especially on the dark autumn afternoons, we decided to call Emma in again. The oppressive feeling he was describing seemed to be much more than his usual response to it being the dark end of the year in a north-facing office or his strong dislike of the fact that this hundreds of years old timber-framed building, the oldest in the town, had an overhang that made the increasing number of lorries coming down the main road into town a source of stress as it felt like only a matter of time before one of them ploughed straight into the wall right behind his desk (the overhanging top floor was certainly not designed to cope with a 21st century highway right outside the door)!

In fact, he was coming home feeling utterly drained, so heavy and oddly syphoned of all positivity, only to feel even more dread about going back into work the next day though he was fine about his workload when he was able to work from home. That office was making him feel, quite literally, sick and unable to claw back sufficient energy, overnight, to keep himself going through another day. It was as though he had a tremendous weight on his shoulders that no amount of sleep or distraction could dissipate because it had nothing to do with our circumstances but everything to do with some unseen force that had attached itself to him. The back part of the building, which was a twentieth century add-on, where his colleagues worked, felt fine so he was quite alone in having this extremely adverse effect to the building and felt quite sure no one would have believed him if he had told them though, to him, the feeling was having an extremely real and tangible effect on his health and wellbeing.

So we took it upon ourselves to get Emma to do an assessment again and, this time, she reported that the building, and that room in particular, harboured a female ghost who had become attached to my husband and didn’t want him to leave (hence the increasing feeling of heaviness as departure time came around each day). She was literally right there, next to or on top of his desk, and she really wanted him there, although he had been trying to encourage his colleague to look at alternative office units for some time, to no avail. Emma went on to tell us that this woman had been “tried” and “condemned” in the very room where my husband worked, which seemed a bit odd as I had always imagined the fifteenth century building had been a dwelling house, not a courtroom, in its day. However, after much persistent digging around, I eventually discovered that it was once the location of a Windsor Forest Verderers’ Court and that hearings to do with the forest, which was owned by the Crown, were heard in that very upstairs room. My intuition was that this woman had been condemned for either trying to live alone in the forest or harvesting wild plants from it, probably labeled as a witch; no wonder she was bitterly unhappy and energetically trapped in that room, I couldn’t help but feel compassion for her as she was, finally, guided to the light. Emma’s clearing of the building led to a very different feeling in the space; my husband was now able to be there all day, with no problems at all, and shortly after that, an opportunity presented itself to move the business to somewhere so light and pleasant-feeling…at last!

So, I digress, I contacted Emma again, this time about where we are currently living, knowing before she even came back to me that she would flag-up something up that I would be half-reluctant to hear but I also felt that I needed to know…and to tackle it head on. Her response, which came in on halloween evening (of course it did!) told me “wow, there is a lot to be sensitive of, no wonder you feel heavy there. I can feel the heaviness of the whole place, there’s a lot of history. Overall vitality is only 12%.” She went on to tell us that, in addition to high earth stress, the property is under attack from a female ghost that feels deranged “like Rochester’s wife in the attic in Jane Eyre”. Needless to say, I have asked her to set to work on clearing the ghost and then we will take it from there, although we are reluctant to get too embroiled in the full clearing of a property that is only a temporary base and not ours (plus I have the feeling that any improvements we could make would be just the thin edge of the wedge, in this particular location…).

How ironic; I had to laugh. The Jane Eyre story has always been one that fascinates me, I made a study of it more than once, for my A levels and degree and, years later (back in 2019), wrote a blog post entitled “Jane Eyre: nineteenth century Aspie Woman” because it had struck me just how autistic the character of Jane seems to be. That article has gained a lot of attention (surely one of my most read of all time) including from an American university delivering a course on the topic of autism in literature that added it to the recommended reading list, thus it appears I may have struck a nerve. So Jane may have been autistic (so, you would think, someone who is highly logical, even black-and-white in her thinking) yet she still followed the clues and listened to her intuitions when it came to experiencing strange noises from the attic. Of course, Mr Rochester’s wife turned out to be very real…but it’s that curiosity, enough to explore the illogical feeling, not just let it go or make excuses for it, that I refer to here.

A curiosity that, it seems, I also possess, which may seem like an odd trait to have in combination with my extreme logic, my no-nonsense preference for information that can be backed up and supported and my tireless search for hard answers. However, its that very search for answers that leaves me wide open to pursuing the slightly more woo-woo approach to solving an otherwise unsolvable issue, such as the heavy feelings we have been experiencing lately, an open approach that has always paid off for me, with some memorable outcomes that make excellent anecdotes. Its this extreme openness to the bigger picture that insists that I don’t rule things out just because they can’t be seen or so-easily proven since my gut has seldom led me astray and I lean into it just as much as I do my head, especially when making decisions or deciding whether to stay in a particular place!

Another advantage of my autism, as I see it, is that I tend not to get panicked or freaked out when confronted with anomalies or entities that stretch the bounds of third-dimensional reality since they don’t shock me the same way they might do someone who lives entirely constrained by their 3D perspective, meaning I just tend to take them in my stride and do what I have to do. I guess you could accuse me of having no small degree of the same “impassive” quality as referred to (and as I strongly related to) in my post about Jane Eyre all those years ago. I’m not dazzled or fixated by the anomalous side of life, its just how things are, as far as I’m concerned, so when it presents itself I look straight at it and deal as best I can. That’s not to say that my “cool exterior”, the same as for passionate Jane, is all that’s going on; I am intensely affected by everything in life, not just the paranormal, but I don’t generally make a song and dance about it. As for a lot of autistic females, my impassive-seeming surface belies what’s really going on inside, not just because I’m masking but because I see no point in making a fuss.

It’s no different to my approach to energy-healing my body, which is something I’ve long pursued and take just as seriously, if not more so, than a more allopathic route. Yet I don’t get too carried away by the alternative approaches but, again, just take it all in my stride that at least some of them work, in ways that are harder to explain than benefit from, but that doesn’t make them invalid (to think so, or to assume that if something cant be seen or explained it doesn’t exist, seems to be the most illogical conclusion of all).

The now confirmed heaviness in this place helps to explain how hard we have both found it to resume our yoga or meditation practices here, or me to get properly into my painting practice, but also how its felt even more important than usual to keep moving my body, to play uplifting music and even dance around the house (I had been doing this already but also Emma recommends this on her website), to keep the space uncluttered and tidy as dark energies tend to attract to mess, to fill the space with positive and powerful aromas from essential oils and to keep opening windows to move air around, even when its cold. Its also helped explain how unsettled I have been and how much I am needing to get out of here, and to get busy, as much as I possibly can which is much more than usual. I could well imagine there may be a link between ADHD tendencies and the kind of sensitivity that tunes you into the paranormal range of experiences and I have found various references, studies and posts on this topic, including this one which suggests it could be partly because ADHD disrupts your sense of time. Certainly, my natural tendency towards non-linear experience opens me up to the possibility of more than one thing happening concurrently in a particular space. I also just found this article “Are Autistic Kids Magnets for Ghosts” and could well imagine I would find a load more such anecdotes if I could be bothered to read up on this. Perhaps, similar to how entities are known to attach to children because they are more open to it, neurodivergent individuals are an attraction to energies seeking a bridge through the dimensions in order to gain attention, I’ve shared some of psychologist Michael Jawer’s theories about the way certain people of a highly sensitive nature or with thinner energetic boundaries seem to attract anomalous experiences and this also feels linked.

Somehow, confirming what we already knew to be the case regarding this house has really helped deal with it…so I find I’m not shocked or afraid but quietly determined and optimistic that, with Emma’s help, we can raise the vibration here even more than we have been trying to do on our own ever since we moved in. Hopefully, it will no longer be such a thankless and exhausting task!

Based on Emma’s past credentials, this house will soon feel a great deal healthier and happier than it has for a long time and maybe that’s been my part in coming here; as in, to shift the energy for this entire place and so leave it in a better state than we found it, which is as I always hope to do wherever I go….as in, leave it in the best possible state I can. After all, if I hadn’t been so sensitive, nothing would have been done about it but here I am, on the task, with Emma’s help. If this effort has anything like the effect it had on my husband’s old office, which they were finally able to move out of, once the stuck old energy was cleared and all the negative effects released, then hopefully doing this will also release us from our gridlock so that we get to move on with our lives.